Lower-priced homes will continue to drive the real estate market next year in Silicon Valley, an economist for a real estate trade group said Wednesday.

“Prices are firming at the low end, but they’re going to be softening at the high end,” Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, said Tuesday, a day before she was scheduled to deliver an annual statewide housing market forecast in San Jose. That should apply across the state and locally, she said.

At a meeting of the state association of Realtors at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center this week, Appleton-Young predicted that about 527,500 previously owned single-family houses will sell in the state next year. That would be a 2.3 percent drop from the 540,000 properties projected to have changed hands by the end of 2009.

She predicts the median price of houses sold statewide in 2010 will inch up to $280,000 — a 3.3 percent increase from her revised calculation for a year-end median house price in 2009 of $271,000.

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